Symbolic links (commonly referred to as a symlink or “soft link”) are a special type of file that serves as a reference to another file or directory. Unix-based operating systems, in particular, feature symbolic links. Unlike a hard link, which points directly to data and represents another name for the same file, a symbolic link contains a path that identifies the target of the symbolic link. Thus, when a user removes a symbolic link, the file to which it pointed remains unaffected. A large advantage of symbolic links is that they operate transparently, meaning that programs that read or write to files named by a symbolic link behave as if operating directly on the target file.
In the current art, there are many cases where copying large files between computer systems is simply unfeasible. For example, a core dump from an operating system may result in data consuming gigabytes of space. Symbolic links are useful for accessing these large files, particularly because symbolic links may refer to files on other mounted file systems, allowing access to a large file on another file system without first requiring the transfer of the file. However, existing symbolic links do not allow access to files existing on a remote network.
For many organizations, the only way into their computer network from a remote location is through HTTP and their web servers. Such organizations would not entertain the idea of giving a user from another organization a trusted VPN connection into their internal network for the purpose of accessing a particular file. Furthermore, it is not feasible for the web server to use any kind of file network protocol (such as SAMBA), since there are too many security vulnerabilities and intractable problems such as remote authentication between untrusted domains.
What is needed is a way to allow remote access to files through a web server while utilizing the advantages of a symbolic link.